What I'm Reading Now

no, this has nothing to do with knitting. Maybe I should rename my blog...

Currently in the midst of the Daughter of the Empire series by, darn, I don't remember who. Read two of his other main series', and thought they were good. Nice, solid, 'I want my cliches and I want them now' sorts of books. Lots of heroes acting heroic y'know. And he writes a darn good tactical siege. But anyway. M proclaims this particular one is one of his favorites. So far, I'm not seeing it. I'm getting a lot of thematic elements I like and could possibly reuse elsewhere, but the rest is kinda 'meh' They're intrigue style books, lots of plotting. I don't think plotting is his particular strength. It's not *bad* but it's not really enough to hand the whole book on. The individual bits are ok, if a little simplistic, but they're very discrete, which takes away from things. Some tangleage could do some good here.

In completely different genres, I finished AspectJ in Action by Ramnivas - ah, someone. (not good on the names today). and man, that thing was thorough.
Normally I read a code book, and it tends to ramble off into directions that I don't really understand at times, and I'll read a paragraph multiple times to get the point. Or they're overly simplistic, with huge sections on 'this is a variable' or some drivel like that. Most often a combination thereof - lots of useless basic information coupled with a few dense paragraphs of 'huh?'.
This, no, this beats it into you. In a good way. Very thorough, repeats the important bits often enough to reinforce them, not often enough to make your eyes glaze. I did end up skipping sections, but it was mostly implementation details I knew I could look up if/when I actually, you know, implemented it. Big fan of, the 'cookbook style' practical applications, an approach I hadn't seen in other books, again, very useful and thorough at the same time.
Only complaint is the book spends a lot of space convincing the reader that the subject matter is worth considering. When, I'd assume, If you've bothered to acquire and read a book on it, you're already past that threshold.